The present disclosure relates to computer systems, and more specifically, to cloud computing platforms.
Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation.
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category and service model of cloud computing services that provide a computing platform and a solution stack as a service. In this model, a user can create software applications using tools and/or libraries from the provider. For example, PaaS offerings may allow customization of existing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. The user can also control software deployment and configuration settings. The provider provides the networks, servers, storage and other services.
PaaS offerings typically attempt to support use of the application by many concurrent users, by providing concurrency management, scalability, fail-over and security. The architecture can define “trust relationships” between users in security, access, distribution of source code, navigation history, user (people and device) profiles, interaction history, and application usage across web services, databases and networks. PaaS offerings may also support various interfaces to create compositions of multiple web services (sometimes called “mashups”) as well as access databases and re-use services maintained inside private networks. PaaS offerings can facilitate the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities.
PaaS offerings can thus provide systems that developers use to build multi-tenant applications hosted on their servers as a service. Such applications may be used by multinational clients. For example, Force.com is a cloud computing platform as a service for creating and deploying applications for social enterprises.